Solar Fuels Modeling Website- About this program


This purpose of this website is primarily for scientific research.  The entire point of solar fuels is to use sunlight and directly convert it into some type of molecule.  While there are many approaches to creating this 'artificial synthesis', the modeling in this website is geared primarily towards the use of semiconductors in co-ordination with redox catalysts for this process.  A more detailed explanation of the purpose and potential of this website has been published in Solar RRL, (DOI:10.1002/solr.201600013).  While this modeling website can be used for single photoabsorbers, it is more geared towards 2-photon tandem devices due to both the potential for highers efficiencies as well as the fact that 2-photon system are inherently more complicated than 1-photon system and thus modeling may provide insight that is hard to come by from an experimental standpoint.

As a researcher using this site, one of the most important things to understand is this is a JavaScript based program.  What that means is the entire program is contained within the website.  In other words what this means is that once the webpage is downloaded, the entire program has been downloaded onto your computer.  If one right clicks the mouse and looks at the website source code, they will see the entire code. Thus there is absolute transparency in how the program works.  (Though completely understanding a 3000+ line code is not something that can be done in a couple of minutes.)

Another advantage of the JavaScipt approach is that the program ensures complete confidentiality.  There is no way for the administrators of solarfuelmodeling.com or any other person to see what information the users are putting into this program.  This is simply because all the calculations are being done on the user's computer.  This also means that the speed at which the program calculates efficiency is based on the user's computer speed and has no correlation to the speed of the SolarFuelsModeling.com server.

The program consists of the:
  1. The HTML program
  2. 3 supporting JavaScript files: A standard JQuery file needed for website design, a PapaParse  file needed to efficiently parse user uploaded data as well as the AM1.5 spectra, and a Plotly file that is needed to plot the data
  3. A modified AM 1.5 Spectra
  4. A few pictures used for background images

The entire program can be downloaded below:
Version 1.0
Version 1.1

This website has been built by Brian Seger and he maintains it as well.  You can contact him here, or to find more about his research you can check out his website here.


While there will be updates over time to improve the model, the original model based on the Solar RRL publication (DOI:10.1002/solr.201600013) publication will always be available at SolarFuelsModeling.com/Version1.0

Modifications

Version 1.1
Version 1.1 was released on July 25, 2017.  This version resolves small bugs relating to the solar cell subprogram and electrolyte concentrations.  Previously the solar cell subprogram would not work unless the photoelectrochemistry program was run at least one time.  This has now been resolved.  Previously if one used specific electrolytes to account for ionic resistance in some situations the program made it possible to use electrolyte/concentration combinations in which there was no ohmic resistance data within the program. This produced completely invalid efficiency data, however the efficiencies were so unrealistic it should be obvious to any user when this situation had occurred.  In version 1.1, the program was modified so it was impossible to use electrolyte/concentration combinations in which there was no data within the program.